The Rubber Paint Company of Cleveland, Ohio created the Zeno Manufacturing Company in 1890. W.N. Brewer, an employee at the Rubber Paint Company, had the idea to start making chewing gum with rubber as one of the ingredients as a sideline of the company. He created the Zeno company.

Mama Strutts once told me that during the Great Depression they couldn’t afford chewing gum, so they chewed tar. Decades later I realized she was referring to pine sap. Paraffin chewing gum was still around when I was a kid.

Zookeeper was not injured during this panda attack. Not for the squeamish.

On tariff wars:

Although the big stock market crash occurred in October 1929, unemployment never reached double digits in any of the next 12 months after that crash. Unemployment peaked at 9 percent, two months after the stock market crashed– and then began drifting generally downward over the next six months, falling to 6.3 percent by June 1930.

This was what happened in the market, before the federal government decided to “do something.”

What the government decided to do in June 1930– against the advice of literally a thousand economists, who took out newspaper ads warning against it– was impose higher tariffs, in order to save American jobs by reducing imported goods.

This was the first massive federal intervention to rescue the economy, under President Herbert Hoover, who took pride in being the first President of the United States to intervene to try to get the economy out of an economic downturn.

Within six months after this government intervention, unemployment shot up into double digits– and stayed in double digits in every month throughout the entire remainder of the decade of the 1930s, as the Roosevelt administration expanded federal intervention far beyond what Hoover had started.